Sept 21, 2015
My current trip to Uganda began very differently from any
other I’ve ever done. A chauffeur came and picked me up at my house and
personally transported me to JFK in a Lincoln Town Car, with my own mini bottle
of water next to me. My chauffeur was a stereotypical Italian New Yorker, and
truly dedicated to his route. He seemed to know every exit and every potential
detour. He had a GPS as well as his mobile phone mounted around him, constantly
scanning for delays and keeping me updated on what was happening on the Throgs
Neck or in New Rochelle. “The Mets are playing tonight! We’ve got to stay ahead
of the game.” He was so chatty, by the time we reached JFK he was confiding in
me that his in-laws didn’t approve of his marriage, as a former Catholic
converting to the Jehovah’s Witness faith for his wife. “Witnesses believe the
family who prays together, stays together,” he pronounced. “It’s true! I’ve
seen it time and again.” I made some noncommittal, amiable noises.
I arrived at JFK and despite the endlessly winding queue to
get through international terminal security, felt a thrill of excitement. My
first international travel on my own in 5 years. Returning to a place I love,
doing something that excites me – and this time getting paid for it. A dream
come true! A gaggle of middle schoolers on a field trip together zoomed past me
in the next line, singing loudly. “This is! The part where! I break free!” I
had a smile that wouldn’t go away. My flight being delayed for 2 hours didn’t
even put a damper on it.
This trip is the first one where I am trying to pump en
route. For some reason, I didn’t anticipate that this would be a problem in
transit. After we reached cruising altitude, I asked one of the flight
attendants if there was an electrical outlet, explaining why I needed it. “No.
There is no electrical outlet,” she said rudely, and walked away. At this point
it had been about 8 hours since I left home, and there were still 4 hours left
until I reached Amsterdam. Another flight attendant came by, and I tried asking
again, with more desperation this time. “Some planes have outlets at each
seat,” she offered unhelpfully. “This doesn’t appear to be one of them,” I
responded. “There are outlets in the back of the plane, but we can’t allow you
to use them because they might break your machine.” I wasn’t sure how true that
might be, but it seemed I was stuck. When I arrived at Amsterdam Schiphol, I
ran off the plane and to the nearest “baby lounge”. I hooked everything up…
then realized that I only had a plug converter for UK/Uganda outlets, and Dutch
outlets are different. My connection was tight because of the flight delays,
and I ran to the nearest travel shop and purchased a multi-adapter for $30, in
desperation, and ran back to the baby lounge, where the maintenance woman
outside said to me “no, this for baby only.” “It’s OK,” I said, gesturing to my
pump bag. “I’m pumping” She looked at me blankly. “This is room for baby.” I
just went inside and closed the door. Hooked everything up again, turned on the
switch and…. Nothing. I realized that my American AC adapter likely would not
work with the voltage in the Netherlands.
I hadn’t been able to feed Soren for several days prior to
leaving, unexpectedly for me, because I found out from the travel clinic that
the live yellow fever vaccine is not recommended for moms nursing babies
younger than 9 months. There have been a few cases of transmission of yellow
fever encephalitis is very young infants (1-2 months). With no preparation, I
had to just stop nursing, storing all the milk meticulously in the freezer in
bags labeled “Not Until 9 Months!”.
So when my pump appeared to be unusable, I have to admit, I started to
cry when I believed that 9 months of blood, sweat and tears were going to end
so unceremoniously. 25 minutes until my flight to Uganda. I used Schiphol’s
free wifi to search on international travel with a pump, and discovered that
the battery pack, which I had forgotten was buried in the bag, was the only way
to use the pump while abroad. I ran to the nearest electronics shop and bought
their entire supply of batteries out. Back at the baby lounge, to my relief,
the pump sprang to life with the battery pack loaded. About 5 minutes later,
someone began pounding at the door. I unhooked the pump and answered it,
finding another member of the janitorial staff standing there, accompanied by a
mother and toddler. “This room only for babies!” She said accusingly. “This
baby needs to come in.” “I’m pumping in here,” I explained, making what I
thought would be illuminating gestures at my chest. “Milk!” “You leave here,
let baby come in.” “They can come in if they want, I don’t mind. But I’m not
leaving! This is for my baby!” For the second time that day, I found myself
publicly shouting about breast milk.
“Where is your baby?” “HE’S AT HOME!!” At that point, the Dutch mother
said something to explain what was going on, and the woman gave up and closed
the door.
I made it to the gate just as the flight to Entebbe was
boarding. After snoozing my way over the Sahara, I woke up with a thrill of
excitement as we started our descent. I imagined walking off the plane onto the
familiar tarmac again, smelling the smell of sweet grass and wood smoke as the
breeze blows north over Lake Victoria. When I finally made my way from the back
of the plane, I walked out to find… a jetway! Never have I walked off onto a
jetway in Entebbe before. There was no breeze, and no mad dash across the
tarmac trying to beat the crowd in to immigrations. In the luggage area,
suitcases filed out in an orderly fashion on a conveyor belt, rather than being
tossed into a mountainous pile on the floor. We walked out with our things and
packed into a private hire taxi bus that would take us to Kampala, no onslaught
of taxi drivers shouting “madam, you come and we go!” Despite the changes since
my last visit, the night wind was crisp and smelled like wood smoke, many
colored lights sparkled from the shops along the roadside, and people were
gathered inside the bluish glow of the barber shops for the evening,
socializing and laughing. Tusangaire mu Uganda! It felt familiar, and I was
happy.
September 25th, 2015
Not only is the Uganda to which I arrived different from the
Uganda of 5 years ago, now I am different too. No longer do I even consider
jumping on the back of a boda boda, letting my hair fly behind us as we zip
around the traffic. I have air conditioned private cars to drive me from place
to place. There will be no crazy mataatu encounters, stacked like sardines in a
tin can barreling down the road with chickens at our feet. I’m safe, and my travel is boring. At
night, instead of gathering around a kerosene lantern to eat rice and beans
that have been hours in the making and then curling up to read a book and
tucking in my mosquito net around me, I just eat a chicken burger and browse
the internet from my air-conditioned hotel room. I spent my first week in
Uganda staying at the Kabira Country Club, one of the most luxurious hotels in
the country. Kabira Country Club caters to the mzungu crowd. They serve an
extensive breakfast buffet and have a half Olympic sized blue swimming pool. I even saw signs
advertising their yoga classes for children.
So now I find myself after a week in Kampala with no stories
to tell. We had some productive meetings with nutrition experts at some of the
major agencies and institutions in town. I went out to some of the finest
restaurants in town and dined with some very nice people. And I have very
little of interest to say about it. Occasionally some of the local chaos will
invade our orderly schedule, such as when we are driving slowly along a Kampala
road and a man passes just outside the car window, yelling loudly “Jesus LOVES
YOU PEOPLE! AMEN!” Or when I feel a tickle in my skirt and shake a cockroach
out. Aside from these moments, it has thus far been a quiet trip – relaxing,
but also low excitement. As a mother of two babies on an escapade from my
sleepless mommy life, maybe that’s just the kind of trip I need.
September 25th, 2015 (later)
As we finish up with our time at the Imperial Botanical
Beach Hotel in Entebbe, where we spent the day for the Global Physicians and
Surgeons Conference, I start to think maybe this trip is about to take a turn
for the better. I’ve been enjoying my time greatly, but I’m a small town girl, and
I can’t wait to get out of the city. I wander down to the beach at the hotel to
try to get a taste of the wilderness. There is a large red sign posted “NO
SWIMMING ALLOWED. – Management”. Hawks circle overhead, and kingfishers are
lined up on the boundary wall that extends into the lake. There is a small
black and white bird picking its way along the beach. This quiet moment inspires me with just a little bit of natural beauty.
As we prepare for departure to Jinja, it occurs to me to
check the price for the drive with my local friends. I’ve become completely
disoriented to Ugandan prices due to rampant inflation that has Ugandan
shillings at nearly half what used to be their value in relation to the dollar.
My friends quote me a price that is far below the one our driver is charging,
and give us information for alternative drivers who won’t try to rip us off.
After we’ve arranged one of these alternative drivers as our ride, my travel
companion, Christine, contacts our original driver, who immediately cuts his
price almost in half. She irritably questions why he was charging us a mzungu
price in the first place. “This is Africa,” he says, as if that explains his
behavior. We immediately decide never to utilize the original driver again. The
Africa we know is not a place where you charge an exorbitant price just because
you think you can get away with it. That isn’t Africa. That’s just greed.
Our new driver to Jinja, Joseph, drives a fancy SUV. It even
has seat belts that work. Initially, we make decent time as we head towards
Kampala on our way east, but soon we are stopped with a line of taillights
ahead of us as far as we can see. The jam seems neverending, as we press
forward 10 or 20 feet at a time, stopping and going while boda bodas whizz past
on the edges of the pavement and salesmen hawk everything from newspapers to
bags of groundnuts to the captive audience in the cars. The exhaust fumes are pervasive. Joseph likes hip hop
and R&B from the 1990s, which is fine by me and I’m even enjoying it at
first, but over time, the beat gets louder and louder until it feels like it’s
throbbing inside my head. I try asking Joseph to turn it down, and he
acquiesces, but somehow the volume seems to creep back up after that until it
reaches the same or an even higher decibel level. I set up a pillow and put my
hands over my ears, giving up. The bass thumps through the seat into our backs.
Christine tries asking Joseph to turn down the bass, doing some beatboxing to
get the message across since Joseph’s English is a little spotty. He pulls off
the road and turns down the bass he is carrying in the trunk, actually turns
the bass completely off, so that when he starts driving again, the music’s
still playing at a deafening volume, except now it has lost all its depth and is
tinny and piercing. We endure through Shaggy, Chris Brown, and Blackstreet.
The
lights of the city recede away from us, and we finally reach Jinja town. We
pull up to our hotel, which the locals just call “Smile”. Its mascot is
depicted in a photo on the gate, an elderly man with an appropriately
infectious grin who the concierge explains to us is believed to be in his early
90s. “I’m not sure if he is still alive,” says the concierge. “This photo was
taken deep deep, in the village, when he was drunk, and the children were
playing around and there was music from the drums.” I hope he is still alive,
getting drunk to drum music and spreading his smile around out there in the
bush. It sounds like a great way to live. The concierge shows us to our rooms, which are dreamy looking with wispy
mosquito net curtains, and walls studded with the bases of wine bottles. I
suspect my trip is about to get a lot more interesting.
